Thank you for sharing! I was just thinking yesterday that I hadn’t listened to Bowie in a while, and how the more I read about musicians especially in the 70s makes me less interested in their music. I cannot listen to James Brown anymore after learning about his abuse.

I find it’s always better to enjoy famous people from afar. I never want to meet them or learn how badly they treat others. I’ll just enjoy the work as it stands on its own.

Interesting read. It’s always hard to read about musicians and artists we all love and see them in a bad light. Same goes for athletes or anyone in the spotlight. It’s always good to hear about celebrities that are actually good people and nice, but let’s face it, in order to become big you have to have somewhat of an egotistical personality and sometimes that means stepping on other people in the process. I don’t condone it, in fact I wish that every person who contributes to a successful venture be recognized and compensated justly. But chances are if a singular person is famous, inevitably you will find people in their wake that were either left out or hurt in the process.

I would point out there is a lot of context missing from the story, but for what it’s worth he did make amends later - something they left out entirely from the article. There was a lot of detail on what happened in the book Spider from Mars: My Life with Bowie by Woody Woodmansey (2017), in which Visconti also contributed.

Mainly, not sure it’s any surprise that bad things went down when creative differences where starting to emerge and money was at stake. They were also in their early 20s, inexperienced at “the business” of rock, and abusing drugs. Thankfully, it was not a stage of his life that became the norm, nor a pattern for his career. He built many wonderful relationships with a lot of musicians and bands over 50 years, so I would say he learned his lessons well.

I consider Aladdin Sane to be a high point of western civilization, but he was really horrible in some ways during that period.

Woodmansey’s autobiography is a very interesting glimpse behind the scenes.